Overview
Cibele Moura is a visiting lecturer in the Department of Music at Cornell University, where she received her Ph.D. in Music and Sound Studies. Broadly speaking, her research explores the power struggles informing vernacular and sacred music-making, listening practices, and knowledge production in Latin America. Her current book project, provisionally titled Listening to the Obscene, examines obscenity as a category of racialized sexuality in Latin American sonic cultures. It traces how censorial politics have shaped the reception of musical and non-musical sounds in the aural public sphere, from the New Spain Inquisition’s ban on sexually transgressive music between 1766 and 1819 in what is now Mexico to contemporary efforts to criminalize Brazilian funk. Moura is also the co-editor and co-translator of A luta pelo nacional popular na Bolívia (Editora da PUCRS, 2024), which introduces the heterodox Marxist work of René Zavaleta Mercado to Lusophone audiences